How To Set Up Your Private Practice As A Physician And Succeed
When you study medicine, your focus is almost always on the patient and how to treat them. Your mind is not always on the business side of things like contracts and insurance and things like that.
Which is why it is nice that there are companies out there like Physicians Thrive to help doctors get through that aspect. But, when you decide to branch out on your own and start your own practice, you have to wear a lot of hats to be successful.
As rewarding as it is to work for yourself, it is a lot more challenging than working for a hospital or clinic within a team of other physicians and managers.
To succeed, you will need to keep a few things in mind. In this article, I will go over several of these items so you can start out your practice on the right foot.
1 – Get your staffing right
A big expense in any office is the cost of labor. Both in terms of their salaries but also things like healthcare and unemployment insurance.
You have to be very careful about these costs or it could seriously cut into your profits. Hire wisely and try to fill positions with people that will get the most out of it without needing to put too many people on staff. For all the rest, use a staffing agency to tie up loose ends so the rest of the office can do the things they need to without needing to hire more people.
This will also go a long way toward employee morale as they won’t feel like they are being pressed to do more work than their position should demand.
2 – Attract patients
The best way to attract new patients is to get your current patients to advocate for you. Word of mouth is great for a new practice, but you have to remind them to get the word out.
Make sure to have the email of all of your patients. You don’t want to spam them but you do want to be able to keep in touch and reach out on occasion. One of those occasions should be to ask them for a review and referral. You may need to offer something in return like a free check up or some other perk for this, but many will be happy to spread the word if they are happy being a patient.
3 – Make sure you are paid on time
Cashflow is an issue for many small businesses so having a private practice is no different. The one difference is usually most of your payments come from an insurance company and not the patients.
Of course, this highly depends on the type of practice you are in. If your patients are mainly responsible for making payments, then it is up to you to set hard guidelines on when payments are expected.
You should have your payment system automated to make sure invoices go out on time and that late payments are on your radar.